The Indiana Senate voted to remove all categories from the state’s proposed hate crimes legislation despite numerous hate crimes in the state over the past few years.

Indiana is one of five states without any hate crimes legislation at all. Democrats have tried to pass a hate crimes bill for years, but are always stymied by Republicans supported by the religious right.

Senate Republicans offered an amendment to the bill yesterday that removed all the mentioned categories, like race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The bait-and-switch maneuver was promoted by local anti-LGBTQ hate groups who said the original law privileged “politically favored victim categories.”

Instead, judges will be allowed to use “bias,” generally, as an aggravating circumstance when it comes to sentencing in criminal cases.

All Democrats and seven Republicans voted against the amendment, but it still passed.

Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. It was 1982 and he was on a retreat with his classmates from St. Lawrence, a Roman Catholic seminary for teenage boys training to become priests. Leaders asked each boy to rank which he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplegic, or gay.

Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word “gay.” They called the game the Game of Life.

The lesson stuck. Seven years later, he climbed up into his seminary dorm window and dangled one leg over the edge. “I really am gay,” Father Greiten, now a priest near Milwaukee, remembered telling himself for the first time. “It was like a death sentence.”

The closet of the Roman Catholic Church hinges on an impossible contradiction. For years, church leaders have driven gay congregants away in shame and insisted that “homosexual tendencies” are “disordered.” And yet, thousands of the church’s priests are gay.

At first, officials at the U.S. Indian Health Service overlooked the peculiarities of their unmarried new doctor, including the children’s toys he hoarded in his basement on the reservation. They desperately needed a pediatrician at their hospital in Browning, Mont.

By 1995, after three years, they became convinced Stanley Patrick Weber was a pedophile and pushed for his removal from the government-run hospital.

“You’re going to have to leave,” Randy Rottenbiller, its clinical director at the time, recalled telling the doctor after learning a child patient had stayed the night in his house.

But the Indian Health Service didn’t fire Mr. Weber. Instead, it transferred him to another hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D. He continued treating Native American children there for another 21 years, leaving behind a trail of sexual-assault allegations.

Chicago prosecutors are investigating a VHS tape of what appears to be, according to lawyer Michael Avenatti, singer R. Kelly raping a girl.

“My client knows the identity of the girl and R. Kelly,” Avenatti, who previously represented Stormy Daniels, told CNN. “He identified the two of them on the videotape. He worked for and has known R. Kelly for decades and he met the girl on a number of occasions. Avenatti turned the tape over to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in Chicago last weekend, CNN reports.

After about a month on the run from the law, Garrick Bloom, who was wanted on 865 charges related to child rape, was apprehended in Florida.

Bloom, 47, was wanted in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. The dates of his alleged offenses ranged from 2007 to 2012, and the charges, as outlined in court documents included:

216 counts of rape of a child216 counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child216 counts of aggravated indecent assault of a child120 counts of statutory sexual assault of a child 11 years or older96 counts of statutory sexual assaultOne count of endangering the welfare of children

A gay police sergeant from Chicago has resigned in disgrace after finding himself at the center of a criminal investigation.

45-year-old Eric Elkins, who has been with the department nearly 20 years, officially stepped down from his post last week, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department says.

Elkins made headlines last September when he and a gang of three other men allegedly beat Thomas Stacha and his boyfriend John Sherwood outside of the popular Chicago gay bar @mosphere.

According to The Chicago Tribune, a fight between the men started inside the club and continued outside. The beating left Stacha with broken cheekbones and a perforated trachea and Sherwood with a compound leg fracture.

Elkins was placed on paid leave after the incident. That is, until now. A spokesperson for the department says that since he has “resigned under investigation,” he will be ineligible for retired police credentials.

The parents of 14-year-old Alianna DeFreeze allege that hours were wasted in search for her because the school didn't tell them she was missing

The parents of a 14-year-old Cleveland girl abducted on her way to school, then raped, tortured and murdered, allege the school is at fault for not alerting them about her absence, wasting hours that might have been used to search for her.

In a wrongful death lawsuit filed Friday and obtained by PEOPLE, the parents of Alianna DeFreeze say her school knew about the seventh grader’s unexcused absence on January 26, 2017, but failed to properly use an automated messaging system in place to alert parents with news about their children.

The school system “utterly and without question breached a critical duty owed to each and every parent to provide notice of a missing child—no text messages, phone calls, emails or any other form of communication,” the lawsuit alleges.

Police in Toronto are seeking information on multiple incidents of alleged sexual and physical assaults at a private all-boys Catholic school after videos of two of the alleged assaults surfaced on social media earlier this week.

St. Michael’s College School in Toronto has expelled eight students and suspended one after videos of two separate incidents — one which involved allegations of sexual assault — were circulated online.

Toronto police said Friday that its investigation into one of the incidents — in which a student was allegedly sexually assaulted with a broomstick by a group of boys in a locker room — has opened a “number of occurrences involving incidents of alleged assaultive and sexually assaultive behavior” at the school.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced sweeping rules on how colleges handle cases of sexual assault and harassment that she says will fix a "failed" and "shameful" system that has been unfair to accused students. In what the administration is calling a "historic process," the proposed rules aim to significantly enhance legal protections for the accused and reflect a sentiment expressed by President Trump that men are unfairly being presumed guilty. More than a year in the making, the rules replace Obama-era policies on how to implement Title IX, the law barring gender discrimination in schools that get federal funding.

The new rules are drawing both applause and anger.

Among the most significant changes is that schools can make it harder to prove allegations by raising the level of proof needed. Instead of requiring only a "preponderance of the evidence," as the Obama administration had directed, schools could demand "clear and convincing evidence." And many schools may well be forced to raise the bar, since the regulations also require that the standard for students be the same as that used for faculty and staff.

WBSM reports: ‘Jacob Froias, 25, says he was preparing to dine with his mother on Sunday at Al’s Cafe on Belleville Avenue when he was approached by the owner and longtime family friend, Alsuino Cordeiro. “He looked at me and said, ‘You guys can’t come here anymore,” recalled Froias. “He was like, ‘Oh, last time you were here, you and your little Filipino boyfriend were outside hugging and it made everyone uncomfortable. You essentially embarrassed the establishment.”‘

In many ways, refined carbohydrates—bread, pasta, white rice—are like fossil fuels. They contain a lot of energy, they’re cheap to produce, and just when it seems as though supply can't keep up with demand, some technological innovation enables us to extract and produce more of them. And like fossil fuels, the scientific consensus is that an over reliance on refined carbohydrates is going to end badly.

Most people who are interested in cutting carbs out are doing so to lose weight. Anecdotal and scientific research suggests that it’s a pretty good strategy to take to drop some pounds. But carbs aren’t just in the types of food I mentioned above. They’re also hiding out in fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, milk, legumes, and plenty else. With that being the case, you can imagine that cutting your carb intake to virtually nothing would be very difficult indeed and—as you'll read in a moment—there’s research suggesting that it’s potentially dangerous. Here are some of the things that would happen if you ditched refined carbs, limited the “good” (or complex) carbs named above and opted to consume butter, bacon, and bourbon to your heart’s content.